Vision 2010

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ISION The University of Montana

Mysterious Missing Bees Researchers find major new suspect for Colony Collapse Disorder

Research & Innovation 2010

ONTENTS C 13 Vision is published annually

by The University of Montana Office of the Vice President for Research and Development and University Relations. It is printed by UM Printing & Graphic Services.

PUBLISHER: Daniel J. Dwyer MANAGING EDITOR: Cary Shimek PHOTOGRAPHER: Todd Goodrich

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GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Neal Wiegert CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Brenda Day, Judy Fredenberg, John Heaney, Rita Munzenrider, Jennifer Sauer, Allison Squires EDITORIAL OFFICE: University Relations, Brantly Hall 330, Missoula, MT 59812, 406-243-5914, cary.shimek@umontana.edu MANAGEMENT: Judy Fredenberg, Office of the Vice President for Research and Development, Main Hall 207, Missoula, MT 59812, 406-243-6671, judy.fredenberg@ umontana.edu.

Cover Illustration: Phillip Welch, a UM grad and Bee Alert Technology Inc. senior laboratory analyst, is part of a University team that found a major new suspect for Colony Collapse Disorder among honeybees.

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Photo by Erin Johnson

INNER VISION 2 / Message from the Vice President Campus research generates positive headlines for UM. 3-7 / Quick Looks UM science highlights from the past year 8-12 / Mysterious Missing Bees Researchers find major new suspect for Colony Collapse Disorder.

13-15 / Dramatic Drought Downturn in plant production suggests drying world.

16-21 / Into the Ice Scientists discover hidden glacial crevasses.

20-21 / Student Scientist Undergraduate helps study Greenland glaciers.

22-24 / Weakened Whitebark Beetles take massive toll on the West’s signature highelevation trees.

University of Montana researchers were part of a team that traveled to Greenland and drilled 13 holes in the massive ice sheet to investigate its structure.

Read more on page

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25-27 / Biological Barometers Osprey research reveals river pollution.

28-29 / River Research Scientists study how streams work with floodplains to cleanse themselves.

30-32 / Translating Hard Science J-school educates next generation of environmental journalists.

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M ESSAGE F ROM T HE V ICE P RESIDENT

uring my tenure as vice president for research and development at The University of Montana, I’ve noticed our University generally garners national headlines in the popular press in one of two ways: sports or research.

With sports we seem to get noticed nationally when our football team penetrates deep into the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs or our basketball teams make a splash in the NCAA tournaments. An excellent example is when Anthony Johnson scored a record 42 points in the Big Sky Conference basketball tournament championship game last season and later earned an ESPN Espy Award nomination.

But I’m pleased to note that our UM science enterprise is making a splash nationally as well.

Just last December, our John J. Craighead Chair and professor of wildlife conservation, Joel Berger, was quoted extensively in a New York Times article about musk oxen. In a fall issue of Rolling Stone, UM glaciologist Joel Harper (featured in this issue on page 16) offered comments for an article titled “Vanishing Ice Sheets.” And in October, UM bee researchers with an exciting new lead regarding the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder were on the front page of The New York Times, the front page of our local Missoulian and featured on “CBS Evening News With Katie Couric” all on the same day. That’s a hat trick of positive media coverage that has rarely happened in the history of this institution.

Such attention reinforces our growing national and international reputation as a dynamic research institution. Many people may stubbornly continue to think of us as a “frontier” university compared to older institutions in the East, and that’s fine as long as they also come to realize we are advancing the frontiers of knowledge.

The magazine you hold in your hands is another tool we use to get the word out about the outstanding research and scholarship taking place at UM. This particular issue has an environmental science focus, and it begins with an in-depth cover story about the same CCD breakthrough mentioned earlier. It describes how Jerry Bromenshenk, Colin Henderson and other researchers on their team discovered a one-two punch of a virus and a fungal pathogen that together may be causing bees around the globe to disappear. We say “may” because a lot of science remains to be done before any answers are conclusive.

Other stories examine evidence that increasing drought is slowing worldwide plant production, the nation’s first climate change minor, newfound cracks at the base of glaciers, the impacts of mountain pine beetles on sensitive whitebark pine, using ospreys to discover mercury contamination and Flathead Lake Biological Station river research. Another feature looks into the sometimes rocky relationships between scientists and journalists and the need for UM’s new Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism master’s program.

People are noticing our growing stature in the science world, and we all need to work together to continue spreading the word. V

Daniel J. Dwyer

Vice President for Research and Development The University of Montana

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QUICK LOOKS Campus researchers continue strong performance University scientists expended nearly $67 million from external grants and contracts to support UM’s researcher enterprise in fiscal year 2010. Daniel Dwyer, UM vice president for research and development, says that total is down slightly from the institutional record set in 2009 but still represents a strong year considering the current economic climate.

The top five new award recipients were:  Andrij Holian, Center for Environmental Health Sciences, $4.3 million.

Photo by Gerry Kano

 Ric Hauer, Flathead Lake Biological Station, $4 million.  Terry Weidner, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, $2.6 million.  Richard van den Pol, Institute for Educational Research and Service, $2.3 million.  LLoyd Queen, National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis, $1.4 million. V

University professor churns out major climate change news To say Steve Running has been busy generating climate change headlines during the past year or so is like saying Missoula is surrounded by mountains. In other words, it’s pretty obvious.

First, UM’s Regents Professor of Ecology was a key player in creating a new worldwide climate change index unveiled at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009.

The new index distills the complexity of the Earth’s climate down to one number – much like the Dow Jones industrial average condenses volumes of data from the business world into a single figure. The index uses key indicators of global change – carbon dioxide, temperature, sea level and sea ice – to obtain its results.

“Some people still question whether the Earth’s climate is changing as rapidly and profoundly as the majority of climate scientists suggest,” Running says. “I think this index will help nonscientists understand why people in my line of work are so concerned about the major planetary-scale changes taking place.”

The index was produced by a group Running is affiliated with, the International GeosphereBiosphere Programme, which studies the phenomenon of climate change. IGBP is headquartered in Stockholm, and Running was among a core group of eight who developed the idea.

He also was with an international team that noted if a bright spot

can be found in the economic downturn that has hammered economies around the globe, it’s this: Scientists have detected a small yet discernable slowing of the growth of climate change emissions in 2008. Emissions grew only about 2 percent in 2008 instead of the 3.6 annual growth experienced during the previous seven years.

But don’t get too excited. Based on projected changes in gross domestic product worldwide, emissions in 2009 are expected to fall to their 2007 levels and then jump back up again in 2010.

So when the economy finally heats up again, so will the world.

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That’s just one of many study findings outlined in an article titled “Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide” that appears in Nature Geoscience. Running is a co-author of the article, which presents the strongest evidence yet that the rise in atmospheric CO2 emissions continues to outstrip the ability of the world’s natural “sinks” – things such as the oceans, vegetation and permafrost – to absorb carbon.

Running and his UM research group also released results of a new study that shows climate change will increase drought stress in northern Rocky Mountain forests, leading to increased potential for insect infestations and risk of more frequent and severe wildfires.

The peer-reviewed study, conducted by UM forestry researchers, finds that longer periods of drought will stress the forest ecosystem that includes areas in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with increased insect epidemic and wildfire disturbances. The economic impact of highest concern is the potential of a catastrophic wildfire in the region, which could affect more than 360,000 people who live in homes in the forest-urban interface that are valued at $21 billion.

“As temperatures rise, we will see about two months of additional drought stress each year by late this century,” Running says. “And the worse global warming gets, the more significant the consequences for forests.”

For more UM climate change news, see page 13. V

Q UICK L OOKS Drug may limit brain injury damage UM has been awarded a $1.5 million federal grant to support the preclinical development of low-dose methamphetamine as a treatment to limit the damage caused by traumatic brain injuries.

The Department of Defense grant was awarded by the Office of Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs to David Poulsen, a researcher in UM’s Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“This grant will help us optimize the dosing regimen and determine the maximum window the drug can be therapeutically applied,” Poulsen says.

His research has demonstrated that rats suffering severe traumatic brain injuries show behavioral, cognitive and neuromotor problems 30 days after the injury. However, injured rats treated with low-dose methamphetamine experience profound improvements.

“After 30 days, we can’t differentiate them from normal rats,” he says. “It’s like they never had an injury.”

Poulsen’s lab has discovered that low-dose methamphetamine administered to rodents soon after strokes or traumatic brain injuries offers neuroprotective properties. Brain damage affecting normal behavior, learning and memory is greatly reduced.

He says the military seeks a drug that can be administered to soldiers exposed to blast-force energy waves from explosions such as those experienced in warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Such therapies would be applied within hours of exposure to a significant blast.

“This is primarily coming from the Air Force – especially the Air Force Special Operations Command,” Poulsen says. “They envision a drug available for special forces personnel who are forward deployed in areas where medical attention may be hours or days away.”

Military planners hope to develop a drug that lessens the incidence of complications associated with brain injury such as learning and memory deficits, neuromotor impairment or epilepsy. Poulsen says military personnel who suffer traumatic brain injuries develop seizures at 20 times the rate of the civilian population.

“If we can protect the neurons, there is a really good chance it could prevent them from developing seizures,” he says.

Poulsen and his partners formed a UM spin-off company in 2009 called Sinapis Pharma Inc. (http://www.sinapispharma. com), which intends to bring the low-dose methamphetamine product to the marketplace.

“This drug application could profoundly affect the quality of patients’ lives if the neuroprotective properties we see in rodents can translate to humans,” Poulsen says.

The company has successfully completed Phase I clinical trials on human subjects and expects a Phase II trial to commence in 2011.

“This latest grant will allow us to learn how long after the injury we can use the drug and still see a therapeutic effect,” Poulsen says.

Joe Fanguy, director of UM’s Office of Technology Transfer, says, “Dave’s efforts offer a prime example of how technology developed in a University research lab has the potential to become a life-saving or lifeimproving product.”

Poulsen says he sometimes encounters resistance to his scientific work because homemade meth is an addictive scourge when abused. However, he says prescription methamphetamine has many positive clinical uses and has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 1944.

“Very little work has been done looking at the low therapeutic dose of methamphetamine,” he says. “Take Coumadin for example: At low doses it’s a life-saving anticoagulant, but at high doses it’s rat poison.

“The difference between a poison and a cure is the dose,” he says. V

UM’s David Poulsen at work

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Pharmacy school rakes in the grants UM’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy ranks No. 7 nationally for earning grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health.

According to figures from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the UM school raked in $11.2 million in NIH funds in 2009, earning a top-10 ranking among 112 pharmacy schools and colleges across the nation.

“We have been ranked in the top 10 since 2003,” says Dave Forbes, dean of the College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences, which includes the pharmacy school. “I think this ranking shows we have world-class researchers here in Montana doing great work to advance the frontiers of science.”

When individual faculty members are considered, UM also ranks No. 7 nationally for garnering NIH research funds. The pharmacy school has the equivalent of 30 full-time Ph.D. faculty members who successfully competed for an average of $374,000 apiece in 2009.

“Two of UM’s top-three funded scientists are in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy,” says Vernon Grund, associate dean for research and graduate education. “They are Dr. Andrij Holian, who directs UM’s Center for Environmental Health Sciences, and Dr. Michael Kavanaugh, who directs UM’s Center for Structural and Functional Neuroscience.”

The UM school was unranked in 1990 but has since seen a meteoric rise in total NIH research funding. It was ranked 37th in total funding in 1998 and averaged a ranking of 21st between 1998 and 2002. Its average national ranking has been No. 8 since 2003.

The University of California, San Francisco, was ranked No. 1 on the list for earning NIH funding last year with $28 million. V

Q UICK L OOKS New company produces brain-imaging agents Two new patents for brain-imaging agents discovered at UM have produced a company called Rio Pharmaceuticals, which offers specifically designed molecules to image select biomarker proteins in the brain.

The new technology may help understand, diagnose and follow new therapies for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression.

The lead inventor of the brain-imaging agents is John Gerdes, an associate professor in UM’s Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Gerdes’ work was funded partially by the National Institutes of Health.

Gerdes, whose department is based in UM’s College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences, has developed tracer molecules that target specific transporter proteins in the central nervous system. These molecules have quick-decaying radioactive atoms attached to them that allow for Positron Emission Tomography scanning. The PET scans detect the tracer molecules when they are bound to the biomarker protein inside the brain, allowing the biomarker proteins to be quantified.

Neurotransmitters released from nerve endings often are recycled by a specific transporter protein. Such proteins typically pump the released transmitter molecule back into the nerve cell that released it. The PET scanning tracer molecules developed by Gerdes target this class of proteins.

If both the PET scan tracer molecule and a new drug interact at the same protein, the imaging agent also can determine to what degree the new drug occupies the target protein in the brain.

“We basically put a camera around whatever you administer this molecule to and then you are able to see how the molecule functions,” Gerdes says. “We can see exactly where it goes in the body. It’s real-time biochemistry.”

He says UM is in the final stages of patenting the chemical entities that interact with brain transport proteins. One patent was issued during October, while the other is expected to issue in 2011. Gerdes says there are two distinct transporter proteins in the central nervous system that are being targeted by two different PET scan tracers he has discovered and initially developed.

The new PET imaging tracers offer tremendous clinical, commercial and drug-discovery opportunities, Gerdes says. So in 2008, he and his partners started Rio Pharmaceuticals to market the agents. The company now includes a strong team of scientists and physicians and employs nine people. More information about the firm is available at http://www.riopharmaceuticals.com. V

Major computer network connects to campus

A blank spot on the map of major research and education computer networks was officially filled in last summer with the completion of a new digital pathway across the northern states between Chicago and Seattle. The network offers a huge increase in bandwidth for research, education, health care and government uses, with speeds 10,000 times greater than the typical broadband connection.

A Northern Tier Network Consortium “Golden Spike Event” was held at UM’s School of Law to celebrate the new computer pathway.

About 60 attendees discussed the possibilities of the new 10-gigabit-per-second system, with other participants added via crystal-clear videoconferencing sessions between UM, North Dakota State University and Indiana University.

“This new network is 10,000 times faster than what people have in their homes,” says Ray Ford, chief information officer for UM Information Technology. “It will allow Montana researchers and educators to do well-known

“Our courses will take on a different tenor with the video conferencing and multimedia assets we will now have available,” Neiffer says. “Our students will be able to experience virtual labs from 1,000 miles away.”

As an example, Jayme Moore at the NDSU Electron Microscopy Center operated a microscope at Fargo, N.D., while using the high-speed Internet connection to display at UM the image one would normally see in the microscope eyepiece. Using a mosquito under a powerful magnification, individual hairs and eye facets instantaneously became visible to the watching Missoula audience as Moore zoomed into the image. She says that once an object was loaded, the microscope could be operated and the image displayed any place that had the proper bandwidth available.

In August, UM and the U.S. Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory announced an agreement to use the new high-speed network to augment area research activities.

For more information on the Northern Tier Network Consortium, visit http://www.ntnc.org. V

things much faster and also inspire creativity in our students, faculty and researchers to invent uses that haven’t been invented yet.”

He says the network is only available for educational and research functions so they don’t compete with private telecommunications businesses.

Jason Neiffer, curriculum director for the Montana Digital Academy, says the new network will be vital to his organization, which offered 47 online classes to students across Big Sky Country last fall. (For more information, visit http://www.montanadigitalacademy.org.)

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Q UICK L OOKS Team discovers new anemone fossil An international team of scientists from China, the U.S. and Japan have discovered tiny, tentaculated anemone fossils from the Lower Cambrian strata of South China that may change our whole understanding of how modern corals evolved and their relationships with sea anemones.

The rare fossils were named Eolympia pediculata, and their discovery in 535-million-year-old phosphorite deposits of Shaanxi, China, makes them the oldest fossils of their kind.

The fossils are only half a millimeter in diameter, but researchers were able to peer deeply into these oncesoft bodies using a new computer-aided technology called microtomographic analysis. It revealed threedimensional details of the fossils, allowing researchers to better understand their anatomy and relationships with living counterparts.

A 535-million-year-old discovery “The quality of the preservation of this ancient softbodied fossil and its tiny size is pretty unusual, but what is even more amazing is what the morphological features are telling us about evolution,” says UM geosciences Professor George Stanley, a member of the research team that made the discovery.

“They are telling us that it is a possible stem group to all later corals and soft anemones – a group we collectively refer to as Hexacorallians.”

The discovery was reported Oct. 13 in the science and medical journal PLoS ONE, which is online at http://www.plosone.org. V

UM hosts successful undergraduate research conference Nearly 2,500 of the nation’s top young scientific minds and their faculty mentors roamed campus April 15-17 for the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. NCUR is the nation’s top venue for undergraduate research, and the UM event included 1,300 oral presentations, 1,000 poster presentations, 60 dramatic presentations and 42 visual arts presentations. Nearly 200 of the presentations were by UM students.

“There is hardly a better way to showcase your university than hosting NCUR,” says Garon Smith, the conference chair and a UM chemistry professor. “If you want to highlight UM as a place where undergraduate research is a hallmark, this is the way to do it.”

UM last hosted NCUR in 2000, when 1,500 people attended. V Vision 2010 6

UM fire analysis group earns center designation The National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis at UM was approved as an official Montana University System center at the May 28 Board of Regents meeting.

The approval formally establishes the center to provide research, service, education, training, and technology and application development to help active, on-the-ground natural resource managers make more effective and safe fire and land management decisions. The center designation gives UM regional stature as an innovative hub of wildland fire research, application development, outreach and education.

“It formalizes our commitment to the University, to the region and to fire and land management,” says center Director LLoyd Queen.

In 2001 the Montana congressional delegation saw the need for a universitybased fire research program to complement fire research conducted at federal agencies. The National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis was formed as a program in UM’s College of Forestry and Conservation to develop a research relationship between the University and the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station.

Since 2001, the center has built a program of research and education in the areas of remote sensing, geospatial data management and information technology.

In 2008 the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis entered into a new, long-term partnership with the University of Idaho and the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station.

The Wildland Fire Science Partnership provides base funding for the center and positions the center as a significant contributor to national fire research.

Visit http://firecenter.umt.edu for more information about the center. V

Q UICK L OOKS Organization highlights Glacier National Park region UM has launched the Crown of the Continent Initiative to act as an educational catalyst between UM and Glacier National Park. More information about the initiative and the organization’s full-color publications are online at http://crown.umt.edu.

Rick Graetz, a UM geography faculty member and initiative co-director, says the Crown region offers an amazing natural laboratory that extends from the Elk River headwaters and Crowsnest Pass in Canada to Rogers Pass and the Blackfoot River drainage in Montana. He says the initiative focuses

on the issues driving conservation decisions in the region and the important research happening there.

“We have grown to include groups beyond the park – notably The Nature Conservancy, the Glacier Institute, Flathead Valley Community College and more,” he says. “We all realize the Crown is a special place.”

He and fellow co-director Jerry Fetz say the organization’s publications offer everything from the physical and historical geography of the Crown to interesting scientific research on the region’s climate, rivers and glaciers. V

Paleontology teaching tool honored by NSF

Students investigate fossil remains in eastern Montana.

“DinoMap: Spatial Analysis of Fossil Finds in the Northern Plains” was named one of 69 Highlights for 2010 by the National Science Foundation’s Directorate of Education and Human Resources. “DinoMap” is a project of UM’s Paleo Exploration Project.

Highlights showcase exceptional NSF presentations and serve to inform a diverse national constituency about the project’s work and impacts.

Led by UM College of Arts and Sciences associate researcher Heather Almquist and geosciences Professor George Stanley, who directs the University’s Paleontology Center, the Paleo Exploration Project taught K-12 teachers and middle school students from eastern Montana to use geographic information systems as a paleontological prospecting tool.

The novel approach resulted in the discovery of important dinosaur fossils, as well as many reptiles, invertebrates and plants. Participants also discovered evidence of ancient environments, including rivers, swamps, beaches and shallow seas.

During a series of workshops, UM Paleontology Center staff provided teachers with background on eastern Montana’s geologic history, formations and fossils. Professor Lisa Blank of UM’s Phyllis J. Washington School of Education and Human Sciences used a curriculum customized for K-12 teachers with little computer experience to build their competence in geospatial technologies. Teachers then were able to use GIS to evaluate geologic formations, topography, land ownership and road access to identify sites with potential for significant fossil deposits.

“The crux of the program has been to give teachers the opportunity to take what they had learned in the workshops into an authentic, field-based summer research experience with University scientists and students,” Almquist says. “The excitement around ‘doing real science’ was truly inspiring for teachers and students alike.” V

UM lands Central and Southwest Asia studies center The Montana Board of Regents unanimously approved the creation of the Center for the Study of Central and Southwest Asia at UM during its Sept. 23 meeting in Butte.

UM currently is the only American university that offers an undergraduate degree in the field through its Central and Southwest Asia Program, and the new center will expand on the program’s success and bring in more federal funding. Since the program’s inception in 1997, interest in the region, which encompasses the Middle East, north Africa, western China and five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, has grown exponentially, and demand for graduates and research in the field has as well.

UM currently offers a major and a minor in Central and Southwest Asian studies, and more than 300 students take classes in the program each semester. Grants and projects from federal agencies have largely contributed to the program’s growth. V Vision 2010 7

A snapshot from the exotic region studied by the new center

Mysterious Missing Bees Researchers find major new suspect for Colony Collapse Disorder

Honeybee photos by Scott Debnam

By Cary Shimek

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ance Sundberg’s visits to that cursed bee yard were like a punch to the gut.

As owner of one of Montana’s largest beekeeping outfits, Sunshine Apiaries of Columbus, Sundberg and his crew were in California near Turlock Reservoir to help pollinate the massive almond crop. It was January 2008, and they had trucked in 18 semi-loads carrying 6,000 hives.

Then his bees started vanishing.

Each day Sundberg went to the yard in his green beekeeping suit to find more of his honeybees had disappeared.

The adult insects were simply gone, abandoning hives with plenty of honey, pollen and brood – the eggs and young developing bees.

“When you go into your yard and find that kind of phenomenon, you immediately get sick to your stomach,” he says. “And the (bee) colonies just kept going downhill.”

Sundberg hoped he was dealing with one of many known honeybee maladies, such as varroa mites, because he had heard of a mysterious new “disappearing disease” afflicting beekeepers on the East Coast. At that time he had never heard the term Colony Collapse Disorder.

But it wasn’t mites. CCD stole 38 percent of his bees in California that winter.

It was a huge hit to the Montana businessman, whose bees pollinate everything from avocados and blueberries to cherries and pears across a four-state region. He likes to say his bees help produce one of every 200 apples grown in Washington state.

Sundberg earns about $145 per colony for working the almond harvest. That horrible winter he was forced to purchase $150,000 in Australian bee packages to fulfill his contract.

“Bees are like a canary in a coal mine, and the canaries are tipping over right now,” he says. “And it doesn’t seem like a lot of people are listening.”

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orget horses, cattle, dogs and cats – honeybees are humanity’s most important animal partners.

European honeybees went with settlers around the globe and are now used by beekeepers worldwide. In addition to producing honey, bees are required to pollinate the crops that become onethird of all human food. In other words, if CCD wiped out all honeybees in the world tomorrow, a lot of us would follow.

University of Montana researchers now have a major new suspect for CCD: a one-two punch combination caused by an insect virus, previously unknown to North American bees, paired with a fungal pathogen. The research was published Oct. 6 in PLoS ONE, a scientific journal found online at http:// www.plosone.org.

When the paper was released, it generated headlines worldwide.

The story made the front page of the Missoulian, the front of The New York Times and was featured on “CBS Evening News With Katie Couric” all in the same day – one of the biggest splashes ever for any UM news story.

Research Professor Jerry Bromenshenk is a senior scientist with the UM team that made the breakthrough. An eastern Montana native, Bromenshenk has studied honeybees for decades, learning to use their fuzzy, dust-mop bodies as detectors for pollution, biological hazards, explosives and even buried land mines. He and his partners also are hard at work creating a handheld device that listens to bee buzzing to determine whether the insects are under attack by poisonous chemicals or parasites.

In 2003 the Montana Board of Regents approved creation of Bee Alert Technology Inc. to market UM’s bee breakthroughs, and Bromenshenk and his crew moved off campus in 2004 to a new headquarters at 1620 Rodgers St. in Missoula. The business employs four people in the winter and up to 12 during the busy summer months. The company keeps the lights on by doing bee sampling and contract research, Vision 2010 9

and Bromenshenk hints that some of their major projects are ready to go commercial.

Distressed beekeepers first started complaining about a mysterious new disappearing disease stealing up to 90 percent of their colonies in 2006, and Bee Alert employees attended a March 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture gathering of national experts trying to unravel the cause. The scientists had different viewpoints, and this original working group soon diverged into factions studying environmental factors, pesticides and pathogens.

Following the pathogen path, the Bee Alert team applied for $4 million in available CCD research funding, but the grant application was rejected. From that point on, support came from “bits and pieces everywhere,” Bromenshenk says.

The Almond Board of California and the National Honey Board provided some money, and the U.S. Army offered certain services free of charge. But for the most part, the UM group tackled the CCD mystery with limited means.

The Montana researchers sampled hives struck by CCD in Pennsylvania, California and the Southeast during those early months. Then a group of Penn State researchers published a Sept. 7, 2007, article in Science that claimed Israeli acute paralysis virus of bees “was strongly correlated with CCD.” It appeared the mystery was solved.

But results from this early study didn’t hold up.

“The analysis we did suggested there wasn’t any consistent connection between (the Israeli virus) and the CCD problem,” Bromenshenk says. “In fact, we found more markers for that virus associated with healthy bees than with sick bees.

“That group worked with a preconceived set of viruses – basically the usual suspects,” said Colin Henderson, a Bee Alert researcher and UM College of Technology faculty member. “So they were working from a group of known bee pathogens to try to see if those were causing a completely new disease. And it just didn’t hold up.”

With the race to solve the mystery still on, the Bee Alert crew caught a huge break in 2008 when a small businessman from nearby Florence contacted them. David Wick runs BVS Inc., which detects biological viruses. He called and asked, “How would you like a better way of looking for viruses?”

Wick happens to have a brother in a similar line of work, Charles Wick, who is a senior scientist at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center. The U.S. Army research laboratory in Maryland is tasked with protecting soldiers from biowarfare agents. Researchers there developed a mass spectrometry bioinformatics capability that can quickly identify all the peptides (short lengths of proteins) in any given sample. Every virus, fungus and bacterium has its

the proteins, digested them into peptide fragments, ran them through the mass spec method that yielded the peptide sequences and compared that to the global library. And we wound up with 30,000 unique proteins from all kinds of critters that showed up in the bees.”

Instead of looking for the usual suspects, UM researchers cast a wider No beekeeper suit required: UM honeybee researcher Jerry Bromenshenk carefully moves a swarm into a hive.

Bromenshenk, a UM research professor, describes how insect iridescent virus (IIV), a suspect for Colony Collapse Disorder, can appear blue or green when packed together in diseased insect tissue.

own unique peptide signature. The Army agreed to use its powerful new capability on samples gathered by the UM researchers even though it had never worked with bees before. This was an opportunity to demonstrate the capability of the new technology on environmental samples.

Henderson says the beauty of the Edgewood method is that it identifies everything in a sample, and these peptide signatures are then crossreferenced with indexes of millions of peptides that scientists worldwide have identified over the years.

“So we basically ground up our bee samples and sent them off to Edgewood,” he says. “They extracted

net in their search for a CCD solution.

They had no preconceived notions about what they were going to find, but their more inclusive approach eventually paid dividends.

hillip Welch, a UM grad and Bee Alert senior laboratory analyst, still has that piece of paper with a graph dated April 23, 2008. It represents his “Eureka!” moment.

Welch was one of the people tasked with the unenviable job of sifting through the mountain of data produced by Edgewood from the bee samples.

“I probably had more than 100 hours working on this thing, sitting right here,” Welch says, pointing to the modest

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conference room table at Bee Alert.

“The database is just these massive lines of numbers that we have to break down into grids that we eventually use to produce graphs.”

Henderson says they filtered out all the plant viruses in their voluminous dataset, as well most of the bacteria and fungi, to get to a reasonable virus group that could potentially infect insects. The original samples came from sick, dying and healthy honeybee populations.

Welch says something called insect iridescent virus (IIV) kept showing up in all the infected samples.

“It stuck out for sure,” he says. He printed the graph to show Bromenshenk.

“What’s an iridescent virus?” Welch asked.

Bromenshenk didn’t have the foggiest idea. He soon contacted Mexico-based researcher Trevor Williams, a leading expert on insect viral ecology. He says the viruses often hide covertly in their hosts until something triggers them, and then they are almost invariably lethal.

“Virus populations often hide in the host’s genetic code until some trigger activates that segment of DNA,” Henderson says. “Then they start spitting off viral particles and killing cells.”

Williams noted that an iridescent virus was known to infect Asian honeybees, but it was unknown among the European species used by most beekeepers.

Maybe the virus had jumped the Pacific.

Henderson says the iridescent virus is a DNA virus, and this is significant because most common honeybee viruses are RNA viruses. DNA viruses use a different infective path.

“Other researchers were focused on RNA viral diseases, and they got real tunnel vision,” he says. “And the only way we found it – I’ll be honest – is that we didn’t know what we were looking for.”

Bromenshenk says iridescents are big compared to other viruses. They get their name because if they become packed together within infected tissue, they can bend light and create a bluish or greenish color. Adult bees with

CCD generally disappear, but some beekeepers claim to have spotted green larvae.

When the researchers sifted through the Edgewood data, Henderson was charged with applying advanced statistic programs to the information to discover any unusual associations. He soon learned that CCD-infected bees had different assemblages of viruses and other substances than those in healthy hives.

And the infected colonies with the new iridescent virus had something else every time – a fungus called Nosema ceranae.

“We found a 100 percent occurrence of only two pathogens in every CCD case,” Henderson says, “and it was those two.”

Common Nosema apis is well known to beekeepers and researchers. The fungus attacks bee abdomens, the insects start defecating and it looks like little yellow rain. It’s easy to spot.

Nosema apis generally makes bees sick in the spring, but the ceranae variety, which Bromenshenk and fellow researchers suspect might be another Asian transplant, seems to stay active year-round and lacks the apis symptoms.

“At the microscopic level, the fungus looks like something out of an ‘Alien’ movie,” Bromenshenk says. “It has a long filament called a polar tube that it uses to penetrate cell walls of its host so it can use nutrients inside to replicate and eventually kill the host cell.”

Nosema is a common bee disease, and beekeepers have medications available to help knock it down within infected hives. It can negatively impact a beekeeper’s bottom line, but it’s generally more of a nuisance than a major problem. Scientists had noticed that Nosema often was present at CCDinfected hives, but it also is widespread within fairly healthy hives.

But what happens when the iridescent virus and the fungus get together?

“Each of these things alone can make bees sick,” Henderson says.

“We don’t know if it’s the two of them together that make bees so sick or if one comes in first to make the bee more susceptible to the secondary infection or co-infection. But the fact is that the two together are found in hives with massive die-offs.”

When the UM researchers realized how important Nosema ceranae was to their CCD theory, they added a new member to their team: Robert Cramer, a fungal pathologist at Montana State University-Bozeman.

“When Nosema gets inside a cell, it keeps growing until there is no more room for the fungus, and then the cell bursts open,” Cramer says. “The fungus can then go and infect other cells in the gut. Then you add in the virus. We theorize that the bees get one infection

the iridescent virus specialist at the Instituto de Ecologia in Mexico, the Bee Alert team was introduced to insect virus specialist Shan Bilmoria at Texas Tech University. Bilmoria had studied iridescents for use as a possible biopesticide. The Texans provided an iridescent virus similar to the one that turned up in the CCD hive samples. This virus, however, infects wax moths, which often are found in beehives. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was close.

Cramer did some inoculation experiments with Nosema and the wax moth iridescent.

“Dr. Cramer figured out how to infect bees with both pathogens,” Henderson says. “He did some laboratory inoculations with each pathogen alone and then both together. There was a

Covered Coveredinfected infectedhives hivessuch suchas asthis thisshowed showed the devastation wrought by CCD the devastation wrought by CCDat atCalifornia’s California’s Turlock TurlockReservoir Reservoirin in2008.

2008.

The small rice-shaped objects in this image are Nosema ceranae.

significant increase in mortality when both were present.”

“And wouldn’t you know it, he ended up with the occasional wax moth or bee that turned green,” Bromenshenk says.

Colin Henderson, a Bee Alert researcher and UM College of Technology faculty member, led the statistical work that showed a strong CCD correlation with the iridescent virus and Nosema fungus.

or the other, and this causes the bees to become stressed, which then allows the second infection to come in and more effectively cause disease.”

Using the connection with Williams, Vision 2010 11

B

romenshenk has seen a microcosm of CCD play out right in his office.

Bee Alert maintains several bee colonies for its research, and – somewhat ironically – one winter most of them were wiped out by CCD. Bromenshenk kept a fancy glass hive in his office with a tube that gave access to the outdoors. That winter he decided to populate the hive with the queen and

“I would say we are probably 85 percent certain that we are on the right track for the cause,” Henderson says. “We found the initial correlation between the two pathogens, and it’s not a casual correlation. We also have done inoculation experiments with closely related species and found higher mortality in bees infected with both pathogens. We want to isolate and identify the Nosema virus we see with CCD and then infect some whole colonies. If that produces symptoms of CCD, that would seal the deal for us.

“That’s the next step,” he says. “We need to re-infect with the exact virus and fungus, observe for disease development and then pull the agents back out. That’s standard scientific procedure.”

“We aren’t claiming cause,” Bromenshenk says, “but we have multiple lines of evidence. We’ve got bees from all parts of the country that have a commonality with these two types of pathogens.”

Bee Alert Technology Inc. Even if the pairing of the researchers Robert Seccomb virus and fungus doesn’t turn (left) and Jerry Bromenshenk out to be the cause of CCD, he examine a robot with treads says, the presence of a new used to carry a scent that attracts honeybees. iridescent virus preying upon European honeybees alone is an exciting discovery.

The UM team strongly suspects the iridescent bee virus came to America from Asia. Bromenshenk says that 20 years ago India faced major collapses and a “clustering disease” among Asian honeybees. British its research colonies by working virologists noted that infected colonies aggressively to control Nosema often had an iridescent virus associated with fungicide. Bromenshenk also with the Nosema fungus. Those scientists recommends beekeepers keep their suggested against intermixing European hives away from damp, foggy areas, honeybees with their Asian counterparts. as there have been more reports “But guess what?” Bromenshenk says. of CCD outbreaks in such places or “They intermixed.” after dramatic rain events. Improving One question still begs to be asked: nutrition also seems to help, but occasional CCD attacks on the Bee Alert Why do CCD-afflicted bees disappear?

“There are a variety of ideas on that,” hives and others nationwide continue.

Bromenshenk says. “I think it’s that they “Our research is a work in progress,” are sick with something affecting their Bromenshenk says, “but it may be the digestive systems, and they leave the most important advance for the cause hives and just don’t have the energy to of CCD in the previous three years.” a few stoic honeybee survivors from a colony that nearly had been wiped out by the disappearing disease.

“It was amazing to watch,” he says.

“The first thing they did was produce another queen, which is rare, and both those queens just laid their hearts out. Soon they were pretty recovered.

But then I came back from a business trip, and it was like a hammer had been dropped on them. We watched as CCD swept through them, and their population dropped down to only one queen and six bees.”

The researchers monitored the oscillations of the fungus and virus loads. They repeatedly would see the populations drop as the pathogens peaked. Bromenshenk says the bees would start recovering a bit, the diseases would rebound, and “Boom!

The bees would drop back down again.”

Since that time UM has protected

Vision 2010 12

make it back. It would be like if you or I hiked into the wilderness and got an incredibly bad stomach flu. We might not make it back either.”

S

undberg, the Montana beekeeper, hasn’t experienced extremely heavy CCD losses since that horrible 2008 winter. He updated the nutrition for his honeybees – going to a straight sucrose feed predominantly – and this seems to have bolstered the ability of his hives to resist CCD. But the disappearing disease continues to steal some of his charges every year, and he still hears of Big Sky beekeepers losing 50 percent or more of their hives to the mysterious illness.

CCD is to beekeepers what hailstorms are to farmers: an unlucky bolt from the blue.

“But I think (this UM work) will help in the long run,” Sundberg says. “If you are dealing with an unknown and you don’t know how to deal with it, it’s extremely disheartening. Now if it’s an iridescent virus and Nosema ceranae, as least you know what got you there.

“Our research community has really stepped up to the plate on trying to figure out different aspects of beekeeping,” he says. “I think the American public needs to know we need to keep fighting for beekeepers, and we need to keep the research finances coming.

“Maybe then we can finally figure this whole phenomenon out.” V For more information, e-mail Bromenshenk at beeresearch@aol.com or Henderson at colin.henderson@umontana.edu.

Dramatic Drought Downturn in plant production suggests drying world

By Erika Fredrickson UM climate change researchers Maosheng Zhao (left) and Steve Running have shown that increasing worldwide drought has reduced the amount of carbon fixed by plants and accumulated by biomass. They are pictured here with the 5-foot-wide OmniGlobe in UM’s Phyllis J. Washington Education Center.

as a gardener,

it’s easy to assume that the only drawback to an extended growing season is that you’ll wind up with an excess of zucchini. On a global scale, climate change has led to longer growing seasons in higher latitudes with some positive agricultural benefits.

In 2007 for instance, The New York Times reported that Greenland – which mostly produces potatoes and livestock and imports everything else – had started growing and selling local cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage for the first time. Places such as Montana also are predicted to see a pattern of longer growing seasons over time, with spring arriving early the past few years.

In 2003 UM climate scientists Ramakrishna Nemani (now a NASA senior scientist) and Steve Running published a study showing that the net primary production (NPP), which is the amount of atmospheric carbon fixed by plants and accumulated by biomass, had increased by 6 percent between 1982 and 1999. In other words, it seemed all that global warming was making the planet greener.

“That was picked up in the media as good news,” Running says. “It was a fairly common presumption that, of all the different climate change impacts under way, increasing

primary production was one that seemed pretty stable.”

Since that publication, however, the trajectory has changed.

In a routine analysis of their data from a satellite that was launched in December 1999, UM scientist Maosheng Zhao and Running discovered that although growing seasons continue to get longer in high-latitude boreal regions, tropical and subtropical areas are seeing more drought. Because the issue of climate change is so politically charged and policy-sensitive, Zhao and Running updated the findings in a new study published in August in the prestigious journal Science showing that NPP has decreased because of drought between 2000 and 2009. That means, overall, the planet is not getting greener.

“Warming-associated heat and drought might become more frequent in the future as more carbon is emitted into the atmosphere,” Zhao says. “Thus, drought-induced reduction in NPP in the past decade may provide us an early warning on negative effects of future climate change on ecosystems and human society.”

Running says, “The other side of the coin is that when a long growing season runs out of water – just like your garden – then your growth trajectory goes down. And that clearly was the case this past decade.”

Vision 2010 13

Regions such as Australia and South America have been hit hardest. During the past decade, there were reports of increasing severity and frequency of drought resulting in pastures turning to dust bowls and fresh rivers becoming sluggish brown streams. The decrease in plant productivity in these areas has had a negative pull on NPP, an overall 1 percent decrease.

Sound miniscule? It’s not.

“It’s not a lot compared to zero,” Running says. “But it is a lot compared to the positive 6 percent rise that our previous paper had. To us, the difference isn’t from zero to negative 1. It’s from positive 6 to negative 1, and that’s a much bigger change in trajectory.”

It’s not easy to project what the decrease in NPP means for people.

Running makes it clear that this study doesn’t predict the future – it only shows what’s been happening in the recent past.

“There’s no direct presumption that

this trend will continue on a global scale,” he says. “We don’t know what the pace of increasing will be exactly, and we certainly don’t know what rainfall will be.”

In fact, the energy balance – incoming energy, solar radiation, partitioning and outgoing energy – is more easily measured and understood. Hyrdrologic components –cloud formation, thunderstorm development and rainfall gradients on mountainsides – are not. Models created by scientists predicting temperature, therefore, tend to be similar. Models predicting precipitation range from “wet” to “dry” to everything in between.

“It really shows you there isn’t consensus in the climate model community on how to do the hydrologic cycle,” Running says. “There aren’t sufficient direct measurements to be

This map shows the 10-year trend for net primary production over the entire Earth.

Green areas show where plants are storing more carbon, and red shows where plants are storing less carbon as biomass.

able to clearly get the physics right.”

Though climate change impacts are difficult to predict for the future, current on-the-ground impacts can be seen in a fairly exact manner. Running’s

UM pioneers climate UM’s Nicky Phear coordinates the nation’s first climate change minor program.

In fall 2009 UM launched a climate change studies minor for undergraduates, the first of its kind in the nation. The interdisciplinary program allows students from many different departments across campus to take classes in climate change and apply that knowledge within the context of their elected major.

The 40 students currently registered for the minor come from departments such as environmental studies and geosciences, but also from programs less traditionally focused on climate change like business, philosophy and journalism. All registered students take course work in three areas: climate science, society and solutions. The science classes provide background in climatology; the society aspect includes courses in ethics, policy and communications; and solutions gives students the opportunity to problem solve through community and campuswide projects or internships, technology and policymaking.

“We started developing this degree because we knew this was an important issue,” says Nicky Phear, program coordinator and instructor for the climate change minor. “We were surprised to find that there aren’t any other programs, or at least not that we could find, that offered students a program in climate change at the undergraduate level.”

Phear says climate change issues have bubbled up across campus for years, but the drive to make it a minor was encouraged by Royce Engstrom, the UM provost who has since become the University’s 17th Vision 2010 14

lab wrote the software that processes global analysis data for NASA, and scientists there have kept their eyes on the data for more than 20 years. Every year they calculate plant production

of every square kilometer on Earth, which is added up every eight days all year long. Each year the science team also calculates the anomaly for that year – below- and above-average numbers – relative to all other years in the data set for each pixel.

“You evaluate that pixel and think of it simply as: Did that pixel have a good year or a bad year?” Running says.

“The nice thing about that is it’s very easy to see. And when you see a whole area that all had a bad year, it really jumps out at you. An anomaly for one year you can write off as simple weather variability. It only gets climatologically interesting and policy-relevant in carbon cycle science when you start seeing a big region going year after year after year in [one direction].”

change minor

The truth is, Running says, we can’t logically expect the biosphere to provide constantly increasing levels of one kind of ecosystem service, such as longer growing seasons, without throwing off balance in other ways that might lead to heavy drought and other disasters.

When areas start having multiple bad years, the result often adds up on the ground in crop failures, wildfires and other ecosystem problems. And if these droughts continue, says Running, food security could be an issue.

“What I’m particularly concerned about is the enthusiasm for bio-energy where it could really become a direct competitor for food production in a way that corn ethanol did for a short while a few years back,” he says. “I think that was just a warm-up to what could happen in the future on a major scale.” V For more information, e-mail zhao@ntsg.umt.edu or swr@ntsg.umt.edu.

By Erika Fredrickson

president. The curriculum was approved in spring 2009 and put into effect the following semester.

“Students were already taking courses in advance of it being approved,” Phear says, “so we were actually able to graduate three students last spring with the minor. I think it’s kind of a tribute to our University and our capacity to build relations and have strong relations across departments, colleges and schools that we can make this happen.”

Students pursuing climate change minors already have begun to make their mark on campus and beyond. Several have worked on campus sustainability projects, including serving as eco-reps to help encourage other students to make changes in behavior – from riding their bikes to cutting down energy use in residence halls. Students also have completed greenhouse gas inventories for local businesses, while others have invested in national policy campaigns and worked on mitigating climate impacts on fisheries.

During Wintersession, students pursuing the minor traveled to Vietnam to learn about climate change effects on local livelihoods and some adaptation strategies in the context of the country’s society, environment and economy.

Additionally, during a summer field course called Cycle the

Rockies, students bike across the state from Billings to Glacier National Park and, on the way, talk with community members building renewable energy, ranchers dealing with drought and scientists studying melting glaciers.

“This issue of climate change is hard to grasp because both the impacts and solutions are so big-scale in terms of our understanding right now,” Phear says. “Any way we can bring it closer to home is really helpful for understanding.”

Dane Scott, director of the campus Center for Ethics, and Steve Running, climate scientist and Regents Professor of Ecology, co-chaired the development of the climate change minor program. Along with Phear, they co-teach a required introductory course called Climate Change Science and Society. To Running, the philosophy behind this class and the interdisciplinary nature of the minor is a model for the way climate change education needs to be incorporated into society as a whole.

“It’s clear to me that for humanity to wiggle out of this mess, we’ll have to rebuild society over the next century,” he says. “This minor turns out to be very innovative. I think that is ultimately what solving this issue will require.” V For more information, e-mail nicky.phear@umontana.edu.

Vision 2010 15

Into Ice the

Scientists Discover Hidden Glacial Crevasses

By Gary Jahrig

Photo by Erin Johnson

Vision 2010 16

I

t’s not the Boy Scouts, but in his line of work Joel Harper adheres strictly to the old scouting motto of “be prepared.”

UM researcher Tony Ward demonstrates how to take a bark sample to search for asbestos.

Harper, a UM associate professor of geosciences and renowned glaciologist, has spent nearly three years of his life camped out on snow in remote areas of places such as Greenland and Alaska, studying changes in glaciers and ice sheets and their effect on sea level.

“When you conduct the type of research we do, preparation is extremely important,” Harper says. “You have to have everything you need with you. You can’t just run to the hardware store to buy a part or a tool.”

Being prepared, paying attention to detail and a lot of hard work helped Harper and his colleagues uncover some very interesting findings while conducting research in Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. The results of the four-year study recently were published in Nature, a prestigious science journal.

The paper – which he wrote with Boise State University radar specialist John Bradford, University of Wyoming glaciologist Neil Humphrey and UM graduate student Toby Meierbachtol – unveiled promising research that could have a significant impact on the study of climate change.

The Alaskan study involved drilling holes 200 meters deep into the glacier with a drill that produces a jet of hot water.

“We drilled the holes with the intention of measuring what was happening to the water pressure underneath the glacier,” Harper says. “We soon realized that we were intersecting something within the glacier that was sucking all of the water away from our boreholes.”

What Harper’s team discovered was evidence that there are huge crevasses filled with water at the bottom of glaciers. The crevasses fracture upward into the ice from below and do not reach the surface of the glacier.

“Prior to this, people thought that the water flow at the bottom of glaciers was confined to just a small interface between the ice and the bedrock,” Harper says. “That’s not always the case. In some cases, the water extends way into the ice through huge crevasses. The reason this matters is that before we can By understand how fast glaciers move when they have water under them, we need to Daryl Gadbow learn more about the configuration and pressure of water flowing under the ice.”

One major barrier to modeling the motion of glaciers and ice sheets has long been uncertainties related to the physics that govern ice sliding over bedrock in the presence of water. One can imagine that water would lubricate a glacier’s bed and cause the ice to slide faster over its base. Indeed, Harper’s Alaskanstudy glacier experiences a fivefold increase in velocity when spring meltwater first reaches the glacier’s bed. But, mysteriously, continuing to add more water does not necessarily lead to faster motion. The study glacier slows down later in the summer despite hot days with heavy melting of snow and ice. The basal crevasses may offer one explanation.

“The crevasses potentially act like a sponge, absorbing excess meltwater and modulating the pressure of the water under the glacier,” Harper says.

To learn more about how the crevasses might do this, the researchers measured the water pressure under the glacier using sensors installed at the bottom of their boreholes. They also conducted radar and seismic imaging experiments designed to determine the volume of water in the crevasses.

Vision 2010 17

it to make a long commute to us.”

The drill used by the research team With the success of the Alaskan was specially built in a machine shop study, Harper and his colleagues now at the University of Wyoming. It is have set their sights on Greenland, a equipped with four high-powered water place where he has conducted other heaters, two high-pressure pumps, glaciology research for the past five several generators and three kilometers summers. of hose that hot water is pumped “After we finished in Alaska, we through. decided we needed to drill into a bigger During the initial phase of drilling, the ice sheet where this stuff really matters,” team went down about 2,100 feet. Next Harper says. summer, Harper says, they hope to drill The Greenland project is a three-year holes that are almost a mile deep. study funded by $3.2 million in research “That’s a deep hole considering we grants from the National Science are just a couple of professors and Foundation and a Scandinavian research a few students using a homemade consortium. Last summer Harper’s team system,” he says. The ice is about drilled 13 holes in the ice sheet in west minus 20 degrees Celsius, and the central Greenland. water-filled hole slowly freezes closed “It’s really in the middle of nowhere,” while the drill is moving forward.

Harper says. “We had to fly our drill to “We have to move quickly and drill Greenland on an Air National Guard the hole in one straight shot before the C-130 transport plane and then move it hole freezes completely closed and we The supplies needed to undertake the to the research site with a helicopter.” lose our drill,” Harper says.

Greenland expedition Complicated logistics must be in The deepest holes are expected to place to move people and equipment take about 22 hours to complete, and around remote areas of the Arctic. “This then the researchers will have less year we had a major crisis after the helicopter we chartered was than two hours to complete their experiments before the hole in a minor crash and was grounded,” Harper says. “I was on the completely freezes shut. satellite phone desperately trying to arrange another helicopter “Lots of Red Bull and coffee are key,” Harper says. from elsewhere in the Arctic to come move our drill. It looked During the summer months in Greenland, it never gets dark. like the field season was over, and we had just gotten started.

But it can be very cold, with temperatures sometimes dipping We eventually found a machine, but we had to pay a fortune for down to nearly minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

Images courtesy of Joel Harper and Erin Johnson

On to Greenland

S TUDENT S CIENTIST Interview by John Heaney It’s cold, desolate, frozen and has a population of less than 60,000 people, so it’s fairly easy to understand why Greenland isn’t a typical summer destination for college students. But when Erin Johnson was presented with an opportunity to spend almost six weeks of her summer studying glaciers there, she had no reservations.

Johnson, a UM senior majoring in geology, joined UM Associate Professor Joel Harper and a team of six others in their journey to research the hydrology of glaciers.

Here, she discusses, among other things, flying to Greenland on a C-130 cargo plane, taking a 19-hour hike and getting one wicked sunburn.

How did you land this job? I had previously been talking to Joel about doing REU Svalbard, which is undergraduate research in Norway funded by the National Science Foundation, looking at old glacial deposits. I didn’t get it, and I asked him to let me know if he heard of any other jobs. One day he asked me to come into his office because he had a job, and he asked, “You want to go to Greenland?” And I said, “Sure.”

Vision 2010 18

UM undergraduate Erin Johnson on the ice in Greenland

“You’ve got to be careful to pick the right people for working long days for up to six weeks straight in conditions that can be difficult,” Harper says. “All of the research team must undergo a major medical exam before going on the expedition.”

The big picture

The helicopter used to fly supplies around the Greenland icecap

Harper said some people were surprised that an undergrad was studying in Greenland. Can you talk about how valuable the opportunity was? It was an incredible opportunity. I never thought I’d be able to go to a different country and study, let alone Greenland. It really opened my eyes. I had never taken a glaciology course or anything like that, so I got to learn copious amounts of information. It was a little bit overwhelming sometimes, but then I’d catch up and get to learn more about different scientific methods and how this sort of research is done. It was incredible.

What was the purpose of the trip to Greenland? What was the focus of the team’s research? The whole idea is to see how glaciers move over bedrock and how the hydrology works under the glacier. They are planning to do three years of research, and last summer was a test run to make sure that everything goes well. They were using a new drill that Neil Humphrey – a professor from (the University of) Wyoming – designed, so he wanted to make sure that the whole design worked and that it could actually drill deep. I think they want to drill to around 1,500 meters deep, and we got to 700. That was a pretty big feat. I think they were pretty stoked about the outcomes.

Vision 2010 19

When Harper is asked to explain why his research is important, he’s quick with an answer.

“We know that sea level is currently coming up,” he says. “But we need to make sure we can make accurate projections about future change, especially how fast sea level rise can occur. Overpredicting future sea level rise is just as detrimental to society as underpredicting. There are about 145 million people living within one meter of sea level. And most of those people are in developing countries where there are few resources to combat the rising sea.

“As the climate warms, you get a certain amount of ice turned into water due to melting,” Harper says. “But sea level doesn’t come up that quickly just from melting.”

The rapid sea level rise comes from ice being dumped into the ocean, which is known as calving. Glacier speed influences sea level through calving of icebergs into the ocean, where faster-moving glaciers produce more icebergs. “We can make

Why get involved? What drew you to it? First off, it was a great opportunity to go to Greenland and do research over there. But I’m also pretty interested in glaciers, climate change and all that kind of science. Growing up in Alaska, I got to be around glaciers, and I’ve seen them recede through my lifespan. I think it’s an up-and-coming, interesting topic.

How did you get to Greenland, and what were your initial thoughts when you got there? We flew from Missoula to Albany, N.Y. Then we flew an Air National Guard C-130 prop plane from there to Greenland, and we took a stop in Canada.

The plane ride was super cool. Joel had told

good estimates of how much ice will melt,” Harper says, “but we know very little about how calving rates might change.”

By the year 2100, current projections call for sea level to rise between 18 and 59 centimeters. But Harper says this projection comes with a big caveat: It is based on no change in iceberg calving rates.

“This assumption was necessary because we have little idea how to estimate what will happen,” he says.

But with 60 meters of potential sea level rise locked up in glaciers and ice sheets worldwide, and with six meters in Greenland alone, there is certainly potential for greater amounts of sea level rise. The big question is how much and how fast is reasonable. The answer to that question boils down to how fast glaciers can move and dump ice into the ocean.

UM scientist Joel Harper works with a hot-water research drill on a Greenland glacier.

S TUDENT S CIENTIST me that it was going to be really loud and kind of uncomfortable, but just being in the plane and having so many new things around me … I thought, “This is so cool!” And then, since I was jazzed about the trip, when we landed, I was like, “This is sweet!”

What was the landscape like? My freshman year I did a river trip up in the Arctic with my family, and we got to see the Coastal Plains. Greenland looked very similar.

There weren’t any trees, and there is tundra everywhere.

What were some of your responsibilities? My job was camp manager, so I just made sure that camp was

OK. I had to make sure that things were put away, that the tents weren’t going to fly off, that kind of stuff. I would usually leave the drill site early with someone else to cook dinner.

I also got to work with everyone with their research. And I thought that was a really good opportunity for me because I got to do a variety of jobs. Claire Landowski, a grad student from the University of Wyoming, had to work with water testing and radon, and I got to do that, plus work with a GPS, the drill and do radar, so I thought that I got the best job. It was really well-rounded.

What was the camp like and what did you eat? We each had a three-person tent, and there was a main cook tent, where Vision 2010 20

we got to eat, read and hang out. So there were nine tents in total. We had two Coleman stoves to cook on, and we basically had the same food every week. We had artichoke and potato night, curry night, burrito night, marinara night, pesto night, soup night and some others.

Where did you get all of the supplies? We were in Albany for a couple of days, and we figured out a menu of what we were going to have. We went to a bunch of different grocery stores and got all of our food.

We packed it all in Rubbermaid containers and zip-tied them shut, and flew them over on the cargo plane. It was pretty incredible how much food we had. I think it was 20 Rubbermaids. It was crazy.

Scientists use a snow machine and this apparatus to do radar imaging on Alaska’s bench glacier.

This shot shows the cryoconite holes that peppered an expedition campsite and much of the Greenland terrain.

They form when surface dust settles on glaciers and promotes faster melting of the surface.

This issue was the focus of a 2008 paper Harper published with colleagues in the journal Science, in which they argued that two meters of sea level rise by 2100 was plausible, but more than that requires glaciers to move unrealistically fast.

“That was a ballpark estimate on the ceiling for sea level rise,” says Harper.

“Now one of the things I’m working on is the interaction between water and glacier motion, so that we can eventually produce more refined estimates.”

Getting a good grasp on the implications of calving is why Harper and other researchers are willing to spend their summers camped out on frigid ice sheets.

“When I began studying glacier mechanics as a graduate student, this was a pretty esoteric area of research,” Harper says. “Now this field is in the spotlight, and we find our science playing an important role serving society.” V

For more information, e-mail joel@mso.umt.edu.

Is there anything you wish you had brought with you that you didn’t? Yes. More chocolate or more treats.

What were some of the most exciting parts of your summer in Greenland? Claire and I got to go on a long walk. We left at 7:30 in the morning, and we ended up coming back at 2:30 the next morning. We hiked to the terminus of the glacier to take water and ice samples of outlet streams. That was probably one of the coolest experiences I had there because we saw so much country and saw the sun rise – well, get a little higher and a little lower – and we saw musk ox and caribou. It was a really cool experience.

What kind of research did you do on that particular hike? We took water, ice and sediment samples from little outlet streams. We took samples and ran them through a radon detector. Claire was studying radon in the water, and she wanted to see whether the water was sitting on bedrock for a long period of time or if it was quickly getting flushed out. There were few traces of radon in the water, so that made the outcome lean toward the fact that the water was just going right through.

So what did you learn from your experience in Greenland? I learned so much: how to work the drill, test water samples for radon, take radar and how to take GPS Vision 2010 21

coordinates for stakes to get a strain grid on our specific area, which was fun. I also learned Greenland is a beautiful, awesome place and you need to wear sunblock. I wore SPF 50+ sunblock every day and still got blisters. I got sunkissed.

Do you want to go back? I’d love to.

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Weakened Whitebark Milltown Dam removal releases sediments

Beetles taking massive toll on signature high-elevation trees

By Deborah Richie Oberbillig

Vision 2009 22

D

iana Six doesn’t mince words when asked whether whitebark pines have a fighting chance to fend off mountain pine beetles.

“I think the tree will be toast in most places,” pronounces the UM entomology professor.

“The whitebark may well become functionally extinct.”

UM Forestry Professor Diana Six uses probes in the bark of this tree to study mountain pine beetles and the fungi associated with them.

Whitebark under siege: This aerial image shows the toll taken by mountain pine beetles on forested land in the Yellowstone area. (Courtesy of Jane Pargiter, Ecoflight)

One of the premier experts in bark beetle ecology, Six fields interviews from around the world about an insect the size of a match head that is decimating Western forests. While most news focuses on lodgepole pine mortality, an even bigger story is unfolding.

Whitebark pines will become so few they likely can’t fulfill an ecological role, she says. Her dire prediction is based on the impacts from the beetle flying up mountainsides above mid-elevation lodgepole forests and into new terrain. Like an invading army sweeping through an unarmed populace, the beetle is plundering the already besieged whitebark, a victim of an exotic pathogen called blister rust.

Typically, mountain pine beetles take about seven to 10 years to move through a lodgepole pine forest. Six says a warming climate is allowing beetles to assault the high-elevation whitebarks and kill entire stands in less than half that time.

“The first season you may see one or two red-needled whitebarks, but by the second season a third of the stand is dead, and by the third season close to 100 percent of the mature trees are killed,” Six says. “It’s scary.”

Head to the high country around Yellowstone National Park, the Wind River Range and the Tetons, and swathes of red trees are clear indicators of the rapid demise of a keystone species. Found in scattered locations throughout the high northern mountains of the U.S. and southwest Canada, the five-needled pines once were able to live for 1,000 years or more, providing an annual cone-seed banquet to wildlife.

Grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area seek out the oily nutritious seeds of the whitebark before winter hibernation. The Clark’s nutcracker collects, caches and feeds on the seeds too. In the process, the bird plants seeds that will grow into a new forest. The tree itself serves as a nurse tree for other plants in the fragile alpine ecosystem and helps anchor snow in the high country to prevent early runoff.

What will happen without whitebark? Is there any hope for its survival? While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is determining whether to list the species under the Endangered Species Act, researchers like Six are working as fast as possible to study and learn from a tree species on the brink.

To find out why whitebarks appear to be falling so quickly to beetles, Six and her graduate students focus on how lodgepole and whitebark differ in response to attacking beetles.

A tree in great shape produces plenty of resin for pitching out or drowning beetles, so it would take a horde to overcome this first line of defense. For those that do, they meet up with a deadly trap that’s induced by their presence.

“You know that Christmas tree smell, the one that we all like so much? That’s actually a natural pesticide,” Six says.

Called monoterpenes, these chemicals are noxious to most insects. The beetles are adapted to low levels, but high levels can kill them. That’s just what the tree tries to do next – form a lesion around a beetle that is made from resin chock full of concentrated monoterpenes.

But can whitebark pines employ this tactic? Up in the alpine Vision 2010 23

country, Six and her students blister rust are important in Beetle-killed whitebark pines are tapping into whitebark and the restoration efforts for this lodgepole pines where they species, Six points out that overlap ranges to measure these trees have no better their resin flow and compare defenses against the pine defenses. beetle.

The results so far seem “We’re trying to put all the unequivocal. When beetles pieces of the story together have a choice between a to find out why the beetle is lodgepole and a whitebark, so much worse for whitebark they choose the latter, until they pines,” Six says. have to return to lodgepole for a The broader worldwide story of tougher fight that requires higher climate change has taken Six to South numbers of beetles. Rarely do whitebarks Africa, where another beetle is decimating put up that second line of defense. an equally fragile ecosystem, this one Mountain pine beetles aren’t complete strangers dominated by a cactus-like tree called a Euphorbia. to whitebark pines. In the past the beetles entered the forests “The systems that are super delicate are the first to go as in brief epidemics that corresponded to drought, particularly climate change worsens,” Six says. She believes it’s critical to the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s and then another dry spell in learn from these ecosystems on the edge to prepare for what the 1970s. may happen in more resilient ecosystems in the future.

“Historically, the weather would change and effectively shove “We are going to have to face the reality that as humans we the beetles back down the mountain,” Six says. “Now, with can’t fix everything,” she says. “With climate change we are chronic warming from climate change, the beetles aren’t being now facing some really difficult situations.” shoved off.

With a new National Science Foundation grant, she’s “Whitebark pines haven’t evolved the defenses to deal with studying how climate change may affect the relationship the beetle,” Six says. “They don’t produce as much resin for between mountain pine beetles and the fungi they carry into starters, but it’s more complicated than that.” the trees with them. Without the fungi as a supplemental food She suspects that whitebarks are stressed from long-term source, the beetles are puny and unable to produce offspring. drought, countering the myth that this tree deals well with dry The project focuses on the ability of the fungi to adapt to higher conditions. While the twisted limbs bear the scars of life among temperatures – ratcheting up the heat in controlled laboratory blizzards and hurricane-force gales buffeting the high peaks, experiments. the hardy trees are surprisingly vulnerable.

If warming temperatures eventually kill off the fungi, the A warmer climate is drastically affecting snowpack in the beetle would succumb, too. That sounds like good news, but West. In Montana, snow melts out a full three weeks earlier Six takes the ecological view. The Western forests evolved with than it has in the past. Meanwhile, warmer temperatures mountain pine beetles. As is the case with fire, they’ve played a lengthen the growing season. If trees are growing for a longer pivotal role in maintaining the health of lodgepole forests. The period of time, they need even more water – a problem for both loss of beetles entirely would be as damaging as suppressing lodgepoles and whitebarks. all fires.

A drought-stricken tree is a stressed tree, Six emphasizes.

Then there’s the complex wonder of the pine beetles that Six A stressed tree, in turn, has fewer defenses to resist invading has come to value. For example, they carefully select only two beetles. kinds of life-giving fungi to carry in their mouths to a new tree.

Not only does it take fewer beetles to kill a whitebark, Six They also release pheromones (secreted chemicals) to invite suspects the tree also may be a better food source. A graduate other beetles to attack a tree, and still other pheromones to student in her lab is investigating if more send a message that the tree is full. They make larvae are produced from whitebark than “Whitebark pines the pheromones from the tree’s monoterpenes from lodgepole pine. haven’t evolved the – yes, those same toxic balsam-smelling “Blister rust enters the picture, too,” defenses to deal with chemicals that can kill the beetle in high Six says. “Trees with the greatest severity the beetle. They don’t levels. of blister rust are the most likely to be produce as much resin “They do such amazing stuff,” Six says. attacked by beetles. They build up in for starters, but it’s more “You never get bored working on these those trees, and then spread out to the complicated than that.” beetles. I need about 30 more lifetimes to healthier whitebarks around them.” study them.” V -Diana Six While whitebark pines resistant to For more information, e-mail diana.six@cfc.umt.edu.

Vision 2010 24

Biological

Barometers

Osprey research reveals river pollution

By Mark Armstrong

Most photos courtesy of Erick Greene

A mother osprey at her nest east of Missoula along the Clark Fork River Vision 2010 25

Todd Goodrich photo

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n a hot summer day in 2009, two UM researchers approach an osprey nest perched on a pole along the Clark Fork River east of Missoula. With the help of a student research assistant, the team launches a remote-controlled, mini-helicopter the student built.

Within seconds the tiny craft hovers at nest level, and the mother osprey takes flight from her perch with plaintive cries. Erick Greene, a UM biology professor and renowned bird expert, watches with a practiced eye the wide loops of her flight pattern over the river and back to the nest again. Attached to the underbelly of the mini-aircraft is a small, inexpensive, point-and-shoot camera that records the entire flight in high definition.

When Greene examines the flight recording, he is ecstatic.

“Good news! Three healthy chicks,” he says.

During subsequent flights, the news wasn’t as good. In areas where mercury UM biology Professor Erick Greene contamination is evident, the flight recordings often showed one or two osprey (right) and student Paul York use a remote-controlled helicopter eggs that never hatched. Since that first successful flight along the Clark Fork carrying a digital camera to take River, Greene and his research partners have examined the nests of about 150 a video glimpse of an osprey nest ospreys along several western Montana rivers. The team often uses a large truck near Missoula. with an elevating bucket to get to the nests. But during the past two years, they also have relied on the remote-controlled helicopter.

Greene has studied ospreys for 25 years. He began his research at UM in 2006 with partners Heiko Langner, a UM environmental chemist, and Rob Domenech, director of the Missoulabased nonprofit Raptor View Research Institute. The multifaceted team conducts groundbreaking research on a species whose nesting and migration patterns in Montana have not been well-documented until now.

Driven by the need to better understand the challenges ospreys face, the research is aimed at determining the long-term effects of heavy metals such as mercury, lead, zinc, cadmium, copper and arsenic on ospreys and their ecosystems.

The famed “fish hawks” of the West provide a perfect indicator species for the research because their diet is 100 percent fish.

High concentrations of mercury found in osprey chick blood samples are the most alarming finding from the research.

Blood samples are taken from chicks and not adults because mercury found in the chicks was acquired from Montana rivers where they nest. Their migrating parents accumulate mercury from watersheds outside of the study area. Through the research, levels as high as 800 micrograms per liter (µg/L) have been found in osprey chick blood samples. By comparison, the safe level for human consumption is 5.8 µg/L. “That doesn’t mean that humans who eat fish from the Clark Fork will immediately have 800 µg/L of mercury in their blood,” says Langner, a German

geochemist who has studied heavy metals in ecosystems most of his career.

“But it’s certainly a valid reason for concern and continued study.”

Once mercury is absorbed by living organisms, it becomes more concentrated as it moves up the food chain from algae and water insects to fish. It’s a process called bioamplification.

“By the time you get to the osprey at the top, it’s really concentrated,” Greene says. “So what we are trying to do is figure out whether this mercury is having an effect on how the birds are doing, and that’s where the remote-controlled helicopter comes in. Now we can access more nests, and we are finding higher egg mortality in areas with high levels of mercury.”

Surprisingly, the source of the mercury does not appear to be from the mining and smelting that occurred upstream in Butte and Anaconda. The research team found the highest levels of mercury in a 70-mile section of the Clark Fork River, beginning about 48 miles upstream from Missoula and continuing about 35 miles downstream from Missoula. The team believes that the high concentrations are the result of gold mining along Gold Creek and Flint Creek just upstream from Drummond.

Vision 2010 26

Like most good research, the information collected raises as many questions as it answers. For example, it’s unclear if the high levels of mercury found in the birds impacts their migration patterns and mortality rates.

To deepen their understanding, the researchers began banding the chicks in 2006. Ospreys in Montana migrate to Mexico and the Caribbean each winter, and chicks born here don’t return until they reach maturity three years later. The team now is just beginning to see banded birds return to Montana’s rivers. If small numbers of birds return in the coming years, it’s possible that the birds are ingesting lethal amounts of mercury.

The researchers are optimistic that the additional funding they are seeking for their work will allow them to purchase a satellite banding system – technology that will allow them to keep much better track of the birds as they migrate. This would offer more definitive answers on what is happening after the chicks leave Montana. From Greene’s perspective, however, the greatest benefit from his work may be the groundswell of awareness and enthusiasm the study has generated in the nonscientific community.

UM environmental chemist Heiko Langner holds a dead osprey egg taken from a nest near Missoula.

ntrations e c n o c h g i H found in of mercury ck blood osprey chi e the most r a s e l p m a s nding alarming fi rch . esea from the r

(Top) A young osprey preens near the Clark Fork River.

(Middle) It’s less expensive to use a remote-controlled helicopter to check osprey nests than this boom truck, which the researchers also use.

“We go wherever there are osprey nests,” he says. “Many of the nests are on ranches, and we spend a lot of time knocking on doors to get permission to do our work. That leads to new friends and partnerships. It seems everyone wants to see the ospreys survive and do well.”

Through their research efforts, the team has created an active and committed citizen-scientist volunteer network – folks who love watching ospreys and keeping records of their observations. The data collected by these amateur ornithologists have greatly increased knowledge about ospreys in western Montana.

In addition, Greene, who Langner refers to as the “ultimate advocate for the program,” works closely with local school districts to provide youth groups the opportunity to observe the research as it’s conducted in the field. Hundreds of Montana schoolchildren have been given rides in the bucket truck and have observed the mini-helicopter in action.

And in the process, they’ve learned about ospreys, their habitat and the challenges they face. In addition to being a fun field trip, the research inspires young biologists and stewards.

Last year Greene experienced the most rewarding moment in his storied 30-year career as a wildlife biologist. The event was delivered from an unexpected source. One of the observation nests is located less than 30 feet from the Riverside Health Care Center, located on the north side of the Clark Fork River not far from the University. Watching ospreys is the highlight of the day for many of the residents at the center.

Riverside resident Mary Torgrimson Olson, a former UM Curry Health Center nurse, was one of the biggest osprey fans

(Bottom) Researchers sampled osprey chick blood to discover elevated levels of mercury.

at the center before she died in 2005, just days before her 91st birthday. She would sit in a viewing room for hours each day watching the ospreys dive into the river for fish, and then fly to and from the nest. When her daughter, Karen Wagner, came to visit, they would watch the birds together.

Shortly after Olson’s death, Wagner began discussions with NorthWestern Energy and Kate Davis of Raptors of the Rockies to help raise money to purchase a nesting pole for the ospreys so their nest could be moved away from dangerous power lines. Bringing this heartwarming story to the attention of NorthWestern Energy paid off. Enough money was raised to purchase a nesting pole that memorializes Olson’s passion for ospreys.

Last spring when the ospreys returned from their southern migration to nest once again along the Clark Fork, the osprey team showed up with a bucket truck and gave Wagner a lift up to the nest to view this season’s chicks.

When the lift lowered her to the ground, Wagner embraced the pole and the plaque created in her mother’s honor.

“Everyone from the nursing staff, to the residents, and even the burly construction workers, were touched by the moment,” Greene says. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” V For more information, e-mail erick.greene@mso. umt.edu or heiko.langner@umontana.edu.

Vision 2010 27

UM Professor Maury Valett studies how rivers and streams work to cleanse themselves. This creek flows into Yellow Bay near UM’s Flathead Lake Biological Station.

River Research

Laypeople tend to think of streams as they see them – above ground – but what happens to water while it is underground is “hugely important,” Valett says.

Think of a river as a string with beads on it, he explains. The beads represent the floodplains. The section of the Flathead the team is studying is one of those beads.

“As the river opens into the floodplain, it fills the aquifer,” Valett says. “At the bottom of the floodplain, it comes back up.”

At UM’s test wells at the head of the floodplain, the water looks like a river, he says. At the test wells downstream, the river looks more like the water found in the aquifer.

“The sediments in the floodplain house microflora,” Valett says – bacteria and fungi that cleanse the river by removing and transforming.

“The self-purification that river systems are renowned for depends on their links to the aquifer and floodplain,” he says.

But that presents an obstacle.

“Where do people live?” Valett asks. “On the floodplain. The first instinct of humans is to stop the river from moving. To stop them from flooding. But floods are critical; they’re the link to all the diversity found in the floodplain. Floods allow rivers to interact with the living things on the floodplain that clean the river. You shoot yourself in the foot if you do nothing but rein in floods and lock in rivers.”

The important work being done by UM scientists is to understand how, exactly, rivers work here on the Middle Fork of the Flathead and how to restore other streams so that they can retain diverse floodplains and ecological cleansing systems in the face of inevitable development.

Scientists study how streams interact with floodplains to cleanse themselves

By Vince Devlin

A

Along a 10-kilometer stretch of the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, near the tiny town of Nyack on the edge of Glacier National Park, UM Professor Maury Valett studies the movement of water and materials.

It’s important stuff. Left on their own, you see, rivers have the ability to clean themselves.

But humans tend to not leave them alone.

We slow them with dams, confine them inside manmade embankments, spray chemicals on crops next to them them,and andbuild buildhomes homesexactly exactly where they want to flood. “Every time I drive back to my house,” Valett says, “I am reminded that I am ‘them’” – the humans who fiddle with rivers – “just in the agriculture that feeds me.”

Valett this year joined a team of scientists at UM’s Flathead Lake Biological Station studying this section of the river, where the tight mountain topography opens up into a floodplain.

Their goals: to understand how the river works to cleanse itself, to learn how to restore other rivers so they can do the same and to figure out how to maintain rivers in the face of development.

“It’s the field of ‘sustainability science,’” says Valett, who came to UM from Virginia Tech, “and it involves conservation, restoration and stewardship. The University of Montana is strong in all those areas.”

So he left a tenured position as a full professor at Virginia Tech to accept a half-time position at the biological station – he can make up the remaining income through his own research endeavors – and hasn’t looked back.

“How many chances do you get to be a stream ecologist?”

Valett asks. “I considered it an incredible opportunity to work with this team, on this landscape.”

I

In some ways, taking the job at UM’s Flathead Lake Biological Station was a homecoming for Valett.

He didn’t grow up here – Richland, Wash., was home – yet he was born in nearby Polson and spent every summer of his childhood and beyond just a few miles south of the biological station, at his family’s summer place on Finley Point.

“The first summer I missed, I was working on my Ph.D. in Arizona studying flash flooding,” Valett says. “But I sat in Phoenix all summer, and it never flooded until September.”

Still, Valett already had spent serious time studying at the biological station by that point, thanks to an “absentminded” professor who wrote, but forgot to mail, a letter of recommendation for Valett for graduate school after Valett had earned a bachelor’s degree from Western Washington University.

“Because of that I had no summer plans,” Valett says. “As a graduation gift, my parents offered to pay for me to take a summer course at the biological station and live at our place on the lake.”

Vision 2010 28

The “summer” course turned into three years working toward a master’s degree from UM under Jack Stanford, director of the University’s biological station for the past three decades.

“My first summer with Jack was the first time I thought about streams as anything other than just water,” says Valett, who became a teaching assistant under Stanford in 1982.

Valett went on to earn his doctorate at Arizona State University and taught and conducted research at the University of New Mexico and Virginia Tech before circling back to his old stomping grounds at the biological station.

He is, officially, professor of aquatic biogeochemistry, although it may be easier to think of Valett as a professor of systems ecology.

“The team has two major areas of interest,” he says. “First, from the development perspective, is the socioecological system, and you can’t separate them. We look at generalities that apply to ecosystems – whether they’re forests, oceans, lakes, grasslands or rivers. Essentially, with these systems, the more diverse they are, the more stable they are.”

The flip side, Valett says, are the environmental applications, where “we use known scientific principles to solve environmental problems. We’re looking at new theories and putting them to use in today’s landscape.”

O

On this project Valett works with the rest of the biological station faculty: Stanford, Gordon Luikart, John Kimball, Richard Hauer, Bonnie Ellis and Mark Lorang, as well as Robert Crabtree of the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center.

As important as the research is, Valett says the most rewarding part is the involvement of UM students from the biological station.

“People like me have dual identities as researchers and educators,” Valett says. “I don’t get students for my research; I provide research for my students. Being a mentor is more important to me than any paper I’ve published.”

Whenever new students apply to work with him, Valett asks them to take a piece of paper and draw what they think their relationship with their professor should look like.

“I tell them I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and to take all the time in the world – but to be done by the time I’m back with the coffee,” he says. “It is always interesting to see what I’ll get … stick figures or flow diagrams?”

One of his favorites, he says, was from a woman who drew a stick figure with curly hair at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Her intent, she says, was to show the start of a journey that would change the curious person she was into a scientist.

“Where am I in the drawing?” Valett asked.

“You’re the stairs,” she answered.

“Does that mean you’re going to walk all over me?” he says.

That’s when the woman quickly sketched in a line next to the stairs and told him, “No, you’ll be the handrail.”

Together, Valett believes, the research team and their students have a “phenomenal opportunity” to affect how Montana ecosystems and resources are viewed and how policies are applied to them. V For more information, e-mail maury.valett@flbs.umt.edu.

Researchers Valett and Tyler Tappenbeck sample a well in the Nyack Floodplain near Glacier National Park.

An aerial view of the Flathead River floodplain, which has been studied intensely by UM scientists

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Translating Hard Science J-school educates next generation of environmental science journalists

By Jason D.B. Kauffman

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the relationship between journalists and scientists is often strained. All have professional standards peculiar to their fields. At the same time, each must often rely on the other.

For scientists there’s the desire to expose one’s research to an audience broader than the limited readership of the scholarly journals in which they publish their findings. Science journalists cannot do their jobs properly without the help of scientists who are willing to take the time to explain the results of their research.

Just as important, scientists can help journalists understand why their work actually matters, which is ultimately the information readers seek.

This is what makes relationships between the two so important. No matter their beat, journalists always seek to develop trust with sources who they can return to again and again.

Science journalism is no exception.

Gaining a better grasp of this important relationship between scientist and journalist is one of the chief aims of UM’s new Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism master’s program. This fall, the program welcomed its first seven graduate students, each hailing from different walks of life and professional backgrounds.

Henriette Lowisch, the program’s director, says science coverage is only one component. Students accepted into the program also will learn how politics, law and other complexities come into play during the course of environmental journalism.

“As far as science goes, we are educating students who will become

Jack Stanford, director of UM’s Flathead Lake Biological Station, uses the station’s Jessie B. research vessel as a podium to discuss lake science during the Oct. 13-17 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Vision 2010 30

literate in science,” Lowisch says.

The program aims to accomplish this in several ways. First, students will gain expertise in a particular area of science. Having this level of expertise in one area, graduates then will be able to demonstrate to scientists that they understand how science works and how complex it is – “the uncertainties that come with it,” Lowisch explains.

That’s music to the ears of many scientists, including UM’s own Scott Mills, professor of wildlife population ecology in the College of Forestry and Conservation.

Over the years, Mills has had both good and bad experiences working with journalists. He says one of the biggest challenges for journalists covering science is how to deal with uncertainty.

“I always tell my students it’s OK to embrace uncertainty,” he says, “that even if you have an estimate of abundance for some rare cat species of 50, but the confidence interval range is from 10 to 90, that that’s actually OK. That’s a truthful embracing of the real uncertainty that’s in nature.”

But uncertainty can be a hard thing for journalists to accept, let alone explain to their editors. In Mills’ experience, uncertainty often is interpreted as “bad science” by journalists. He says they’ll often turn around and seek out another scientist who will give them a more definitive answer, even though that scientist may not know as much about the particular topic.

“Embracing that uncertainty is in our world the sign of a good scientist – a true scientist,” Mills says.

In reality, there are degrees of uncertainty in science, Mills explains.

A perfect example of the challenges of uncertainty, and one that ultimately became a national headline in Newsweek, had to do with a snowshoe hare study Mills spearheads in the Seeley Lake area northeast of Missoula.

There, Mills and several of his students investigate how climate change may or may not impact these forest-dwelling critters.

Because of warming trends in Montana’s climate, snowshoe hares are turning pure white before there’s snow on the ground. Mills can’t yet say for sure what the impacts of these bright white “flash bulbs” against the brown forest floor will be. Nevertheless, Newsweek ran with a headline proclaiming this to be “The case of the disappearing rabbit.” Not only was this incorrect from a species standpoint – hares aren’t rabbits – but it also overstated what Mills’ research can say with confidence.

“We don’t know what the cost of the mismatch is for the hares,” he says.

“There’s a mutual respect that needs to be there. You increase that respect if you show that you explored and grasped one area of science.”

The arrival of such a specialized program to the UM campus couldn’t have been better timed. Just six weeks after the first batch of environmental journalism recruits sat down for their first class this autumn semester, the Society of Environmental Journalists held its 20th annual conference on the UM campus. While in Missoula, SEJ members from around the country and world were exposed to important

Ric Hauer, a UM biological station professor, lectures on stream ecology to visiting journalists.

“Right now we’re collecting the data.

That’s a level of uncertainty that I just don’t know yet.”

In the end, successful relationships between scientists and journalists hinge on trust. Reluctant scientists will go that extra mile with a journalist to help them understand a particularly challenging aspect of their research if they feel the journalist is giving the topic the time and respect it deserves. That’s something UM’s new environmental journalism program hopes to instill in its graduate students.

“It’s totally about a trust thing and also a matter of respect,” Lowisch says.

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environmental and natural resource topics – many of them with a Montana twist.

The conference was a remarkable opportunity for UM’s environmental journalism students. From sitting in on panel discussions to taking daylong outings to explore environmental stories, students were introduced to many of their future colleagues and the full range of work they produce.

“You see all these possibilities,” Lowisch says. “You can basically touch them. It’s different than sitting in a (professor’s) seminar.”

Longtime SEJ member and

Dan Pletscher (center), director of UM’s Wildlife Biology Program, addresses attendees at the 20th annual Society of Environmental Journalists convention.

environmental journalist Mark Schleifstein, a reporter with the TimesPicayune newspaper in New Orleans, attended the conference. During his 26 years at the newspaper, Schleifstein has gained recognition beyond the Gulf Coast region for his excellent environmental science coverage. His

While environmental stories are not always so high-profile, they are about important topics that require a patient approach by journalists. work during and after Hurricane Katrina helped his newspaper win Pulitzer Prizes for public service and breaking news reporting.

While environmental stories are not always so high-profile, they are about important topics that require a patient approach by journalists, Schleifstein says. One challenging story that he and former Times-Picayune reporter John McQuaid tackled together was the invasion of non-native Formosan termites in New Orleans. After a full year of investigation and information-

gathering, the duo’s work was published in a lengthy series titled “Home Wreckers: How the Formosan termite is devastating New Orleans.”

“We’ve been dealing with these termites for quite a while. Everybody knew about it,” Schleifstein says. “But nobody had done an in-depth look at what these termites are doing – what effects they’re having on people and why they’re such a problem.”

The project required Schleifstein to do some serious brushing up on entomology, the study of insects. What he learned was that pest control operators were having an increasingly difficult time treating for this destructive insect. Some pesticides were no longer effective, and others had simply been taken off the market.

Approaching scientists for the story wasn’t easy either. “Entomologists were not necessarily interested in talking to reporters,” he says. “Most of their research was tied financially to chemical companies.”

But after a lot of hard work to better understand the science, the entomologists were pleased with the reporting. Even New Orleans’ pest control operators appreciated the journalists’ diligence.

“I got a standing ovation from the Pest Control Operators Association,” Schleifstein says with a laugh.

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Most important, his readers knew a lot more about an invisible but very important topic affecting their lives.

Schleifstein’s advice to budding science reporters: Make sure to understand the limits of what scientists can say, and make sure they understand the limits of what journalists can do.

“Scientists basically do not understand the deadlines that reporters are under,” he says. “Reporters generally don’t understand the restrictions that scientists have, especially in terms of the peer review process.”

Having that basic background in science is key, and it’s what will put UM’s environmental journalism students on the road to success, says SEJ member Jennifer Weeks, a freelance science and environmental writer.

“It’s a lot like going to another country,” she says. “It really helps if you’ve learned at least a few phrases in the local language. I really find that most scientists are willing to explain things.” V For more information, e-mail henriette.lowisch@umontana.edu.

Henriette Lowisch, shown here outside UM’s Don Anderson Hall, directs the new Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism master’s program.

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years to live.

No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”

Attributed to Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, 1879-1955

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